Every Artist Must Have A Critical Spirit

            On Wednesday morning I finished translating "Quand ça balance" (When I'm Off Balance) by Serge Gainsbourg and memorized the first verse. 

            I weighed 90.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            I logged on to Quercus at noon for my Brit Lit 2 tutorial but what I really felt like doing was sleeping. Once we all started talking I felt my energy come back. 

            I asked if when they write the questions for the quizzes do they deliberately put in wrong correct answers? Carson said he didn’t think so but he recognizes that some of the questions are so obscure that they can be answered in multiple ways. 

            In response to a question about the essay he said that if one wants to use one text that is a statement on writerly practice as a lens for reading another text, one can do that. The paper’s deadline is the end of March but it’s a soft deadline and so there is no late penalty. However the latest turn in date possible is April 19 because after that there will be no one to mark the essay. Also if one hands in the paper in April there would be a lot less feedback. 

            Carson told us that the union to which the TAs belong is in collective bargaining and he is the shop steward for his unit. The negotiations have reached a tense point. They can’t bargain for more than a 1% pay raise in the current climate but they are arguing for better working conditions. Carson posted a link and asked students that felt like it to email the administration and urge them to come to a settlement. 

            We started off talking about Oscar Wilde’s The Critic As Artist.

            I said I don’t think the professor took it deep enough. He said that the artist and critic are separate entities but Wilde is saying that one can’t be an artist without a critical approach. I said that Wilde is very Nietzschean and it’s surprising that they never mentioned one another since they have similar arguments. 

           Carson thinks that Wilde may have hinted at Nietzsche when he called himself a Christian Nihilist. 

            At one point Wilde references the coming revolution but I said I don’t think he is offering a political solution. He suggests that if society were less political and more oriented towards beauty it would solve a lot of the problems. 

            Wilde critiques charity as a band aid solution and says the problems must be solved at the root.

            There is an irony to both George Eliot and Wilde’s positions. 

            Wilde lived from 1854 to 1900 and so he never quite made it to be a 20th Century author. E.M. Forster lived from 1879 to 1970 and so he was very much a man of the last century. He was a humanist, which has a wide definition. It is a secularist philosophy that advocates for the agency of human beings and free will. 

            In his story “The Machine Stops” I pointed out that there is a lot of symbolism of birth and the womb. Vashti’s home environment is very womblike and her physical description is very much like a baby. She is somewhat shapeless and bald and outside of her room is a tunnel. 

            The life of the people in this world is like our life right now. It is a whole society of Zoom users even though the story was written in 1906. 

            Carson asked what we thought of the constant drive for ideation means. 

            I suggested that the ideas feed the machine. But people keep asking others if they have had any ideas and yet no one seems to have any. Perhaps the people running out of ideas stands in direct relation to the machine running down. 

            Marx described capitalism as commodity fetishism. We make things but then we act as if the things we made are telling us what to do. The story is a critique of utilitarianism. 

            I said that I don’t think Forster is consciously writing a critique. It’s speculative fiction and he is expanding and projecting current tendencies of his own era. 

            It is critical fiction. The narrator does not insert himself personally until near the end. This embodies the extent to which this is an exercise in what if. 

            The machine is like a totalitarian society. 

            There are still a small group of people living free on the poisoned Earth. 

            I said I find it interesting that the people only begin to worship the machine when it begins to fail. They increase their faith in it as it becomes less dependable. 

            I weighed 89.9 kilos before lunch. I had a tomato and two avocados with lime juice again on this thirteenth day of my fourteen day fast. 

            When I was heading out for a bike ride I met Benji, who was heading for a walk. He complained again to me about the workers in Popeyes blasting music in the wee hours when he is trying to sleep. He asked me to sometime go in there and tell them to keep the volume down. He said that since he is brown like they are they would not listen to him as much as they would a white man. He also said that in the middle of the night when I get up and walk to my washroom on his side of the building, when they hear someone walking above them they turn the music down. 

            I weighed 87.9 half an hour after I got back from my bike ride. Two kilograms is quite a drop in nine hours. Maybe that’s why I felt so weak today. 

            I continued with my fourth reading of The Critic As Artist to look for quotes for my essay. There are some good quotes but not necessarily that fit my argument: “Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.” “the development of the race depends on the development of the individual” “the weakness of England lies in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.” “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all (30).” “Art creates in listener and spectator a form of divine madness (32).”

            I weighed 88.9 kilos before dinner. For dinner I had the same thing that I had for lunch but a little more of it plus some chopped scotch bonnet pepper. I ate while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story Andy goes to Wally’s Filling Station to get a carburetor put in but Wally is away and Gomer is not a mechanic. Then Mr. Carter brings Jimmy Morgan in and wants Andy to arrest him. Jimmy had done some stealing in the past but Andy had faith that he could become more responsible and so he had convinced Carter to hire Jimmy to make deliveries. Now Carter claims that he caught Jimmy stealing the battery from his truck. Jimmy explains that he’d built a starter motor out of old parts and wanted to see if it worked so he took Mr Carter’s battery out for a few minutes. But then it slipped from his hand and broke. He says he’d planned on replacing it. Andy suddenly sees that Jimmy has mechanical talent and he also knows that Wally’s garage is backed up because of Wally being gone. He convinces Gomer to hire Jimmy. But then things start to go missing from the garage and Barney is sure that Jimmy is the culprit but Andy is not. Barney rigs up a camera to the door so that anyone that opens it will have their picture taken. Gomer uses his catchword, “Shazam” for the first time and adds, “Captain Marvel wouldn’t’a thought’a that!” But while Barney is waiting at night for someone to break in, we see that there is someone hiding in a car trunk who comes out and steals things from the inside. Later when they get a tip that someone is at the filling station they come and see Jimmy attaching wires to the cash register. They figure he must be trying break it open. After Jimmy runs the wires to a batter Andy approaches to arrest him but then suddenly screaming is heard from inside the filling station. Inside the man who’d been hiding in the trunk is getting a shock from the cash register and he can’t let go. Jimmy turns the switch off and Andy arrests the real thief.